


These Hands, Your Newspaper Seance

by thought



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 01:57:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2330987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agent Texas does not complete the mission objective. Probably.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Hands, Your Newspaper Seance

"You know, it's not my fault your girlfriend hates me," Tex says, staring down out of the open hatch and the treetops far below.

"I'm aware. I am not actually entirely oblivious, unlike a few other people I could name. Also still not dating Carolina."

"Does York know that?"

"Is it his business?"

"You really can't get any lower, huh?"

From the cockpit, Four Seven huffs out an irritable sigh. "Do you see a clearing large enough for a Pelican down there? I'll give you a hint, the enemy base doesn't count. Neither does the river."

Tex braces her boots more firmly against the edge of the deck, makes sure her guns are secure in the mag-clamps. "I'm going, I'm going."

"Hey, after your dumb fucking stunt last month this should be a piece of cake. I mean, I know Wash is kind of a dork, but it takes a special sort of social awkwardness to choose jumping without a jetpack--"

Tex lets go of the security straps and kicks off into the air, twisting her body to provide as much wind resistance as possible. She's not falling far, so there’s no time to adjust her trajectory once her boots leave metal, but she'd prefer not to leave a crater when she lands. The treetops rush up fast, and she crashes through the foliage in a cacophony of snapping branches and screeching birds. It's a good thing the Insurrectionist compound is a couple clicks down river, because there's no way anybody nearby could've missed her arrival.

The landing jolts her head back against her helmet and she can feel as the jell in her armour pulses in delayed reaction to the rapid shift and hard impact. She looses a couple seconds to lying face down in the dirt while her body catches up to events, blinks the swirls of junk symbols away as they flicker across her eyelids. She’s gonna have a fucking monster head ache later. She sits up, looks up through the hole in the canopy of green and yellow leaves she's left in her wake and catches the faint trail of the Pelican vanishing back up into the upper edges of the atmosphere. Her HUD's not reading any life signs nearby beyond the wildlife, so she takes a minute sitting on her ass to yank the helmet off and use a handful of leaves to wipe away the worst of the mud and decaying organic matter from the visor.

The target is 2.3 kilometers east of her current position, but there are probably security measures starting at least half a kilometer out. She could follow the line of the river, but it won't take much longer to circle around and come in at a forty-five degree angle in hopes that they've been subconsciously using the river as a primary landmark and will assume others will be doing the same. She doesn't bother cloaking this far out-- figures the distraction of maintaining the equipment use will cancel out any benefit. Besides, at this distance it’s not visual ID she needs to worry about. It starts raining about five minutes into the trip, and it doesn’t take long for the soft soil to turn to clinging sloppy mud under her boots.

"What’s your ETA on the target?" Four Seven's voice comes over the radio. It's not a standard check in, but they'd never confirmed radio silence and the Freelancer com freqs are secure enough that a bit of casual chatter isn't likely to risk a mission.

"Fifteen minutes," Tex says. "Assuming I don't set off any perimeter alerts."

"Yeah I'm gonna need you to speed things up," the pilot says, and now Tex notices the slight tension creeping its way under her casual tone.

"We got trouble?" Tex speeds up, sacrificing stealth and hoping the heavy rain will serve as some measure of extra cover.

"You could say that. Just get the job done and get your ass to the extraction point fast as you can."

Tex doesn't like being left in the dark, but she knows there is value in holding back information when it's only purpose would be as potential distraction. She hits the eight-hundred meter point, jumps the landmines and activates her cloak. She knows she's capable of moving much faster, but the Intel she’s working off of is almost a month old and she's not willing to come up on the compound without a bit of recon.

Her boot slips on a patch of wet leaves at the same time Four Seven swears harshly through the radio. Tex struggles to get her feet back under her but the ground heaves and shutters and she almost skids into a tree before she can get her balance.

"What the fuck is going on?" she demands.

"Get out of there," Four seven snarls. "Head southwest, fast as you can, I'm tracking you. I'll get as close as I can, but you might wanna start looking for a good climbing tree because I'm still not gonna be able to land."

"I have not reached the target, Four Seven," Tex says, activating thermals and long-range scanning on her HUD. "Mission objective has not been achieved. Confirm?"

"Yeah, you're confirmed, Texas. Abort. Now get moving!"

Tex hurls herself back the way she'd come, crashing through the underbrush and spraying mud in her wake. Her thermal readouts are going crazy, the entire lower left quadrant of her map lit up in dull red.

"Fuck!" Four seven hisses. "North, North, Texas. Do not continue on your current trajectory, head northwest. Fucking confirm-- oh my God."

Tex pushes off a nearby tree, using the momentum to swing into a turn and pushing her body as hard as it will go. "Confirmed, Four Seven. Where are you? What the fuck is going on?" Behind her the skyline flares white and there's another thunderclap rocketing through the ground. A wall of steam rises up over the trees where the river is meant to be.

"I'm moving up on you now," Four seven says, the frantic shock of a few seconds previous absent from her voice. "Find a tall goddamn tree and start climbing."

Tex makes a running jump at a likely looking candidate, wrapping arms and legs around the trunk as soon as she hits and clawing her way upward, gloves digging holes into the wood, sticky sap leaking out over her fingers. There's no fucking way any of the branches would hold her weight, not in the armour. Once she's at the top of the tree she has a minute to look out over the landscape with her own eyes.

Everything is on fire.

Or rather, everything beyond the river is smoking and bubbling like an ill-fated casserole fresh out of the oven, the rain and river water billowing across the now clear surface in a furiously roiling mess, making everything hazy and formless, morphing the world into a surreal wavering storm of warped snatches of burning ground and Smokey air.

"Are we getting glassed?" she demands, incredulous. The question is directed more at the universe in general, but Four Seven responds anyway.

"Looks that way. Covies came out of nowhere, three battle cruisers, started shooting without so much as a 'hello'."

Tex watches as, in the distance, there's another blinding flare of white blotting out the horizon. Seems like the strafing run is headed away from her position, but that could change at any moment. She thinks about the heat, the light, the way everything turns to ash and lava and gas under the unforgiving focus of the plasma beams. Statistics flicker across the back of her mind like a flashing banner advertisement. Death tolls and ranges and time to cooling and recolonization potentials. She imagines the heat again, the way the armour would fuse with her skin for the nano seconds before she stopped existing entirely. Wonders if it's enough time to realize what's happening to you-- look over at the marine next to you, meet his gaze in a shared acknowledgement of your own mortality. Wonders if you try to get away. How fast-- she's not Carolina fast but she can make good speed. Everybody running with no way off planet, hoping for a magical cave to hide in, a patch of ground miraculously left standing. Wonders who prays, at the end. Wonders who tries to get messages out. Wonders if anybody has time for any of that. Knows she'll never know the answers. Knows it like she knows the way her muscles strain to hold her body against the tree, knows it like she knows few other things. Is uncertain how she can so quickly bring to mind the imaginings of a death when she's equally certain of her lack of understanding.

"I'm coming in hot," Four Seven says, and Tex refocuses on the current situation with an effort. "Almost got hit in the blast by the river. I see you, be ready to jump for me."

"Got it," says Tex. "Not quite sure how you think I'm gonna jump up from a tree, but sure. I've got it."

"You're creative, I'm sure you'll think of something. Eight seconds."

The pelican dives straight towards her. She pulls her legs up so she's crouched hunched over the top of the tree, boots braced sideways on either side of the trunk, hands prepared to shove off from the points where the strongest branches meet the trunk. She hadn’t expected Four Seven's definition of coming in hot to be quite as literal as 'on fire', but when she gets a closer look at the underbelly of the ship there are flames dancing around the back end where there should definitely not be flames. The hatch pops open. Tex takes a deep breath and flips up on her hands, hurling her body upwards into a brief handstand and then pushing off with her arms, wrists protesting even in the armour. She activates the mag lock on her boots as soon as she feels them brush the hull of the Pelican, and manages to overcome, barely, the disorientating pull of gravity and wind as the little ship banks sharply out of the dive, arcing hard up from the downswing of the V and streaking towards the atmosphere. She gets a grip on the edge of the hatch and drags herself inside inch by inch, finally releasing her boots and flipping end over end into the hold until she comes to rest against the back wall. The hatch hisses shut. Tex uses one of the straps on the wall to pull herself to her feet.

"You gonna be able to break atmo without burning up?" she calls to the front.

"If I can't you can feel free to file a complaint," Four Seven yells back.

"Why are they glassing this place?" Tex demands, hauling herself up towards the cockpit. "It's just a bunch of eco-terrorists and a legion of squirrels."

"You wanna stop and ask?" Four Seven retorts. Tex shakes her head silently, and settles into the gunner's seat. Usually Carolina's place, but there's nobody around to complain.

The gravity stabilizers kick in as soon as they cross the final atmospheric layer, and Tex jolts forward against the safety harness as everything resettles to an even keel. Four Seven has stopped swearing, so Tex figures they're probably no longer on fire. She keeps quiet nonetheless-- there's an innate understanding built into all marines that you don't get on the wrong side of your pilot unless you want a very unpleasant life.

"We're going to run quiet until we hit the other side of the moon," Four seven says evenly. "Those cruisers are focused on the surface right now, but I'd rather not draw their attention."

The next hour feels like it lasts for years. Tex is painfully aware of every second that they go unnoticed, and equally aware of the decreasing odds of their continued stealth as time passes. Dying in space would not be the sort of instant death of a plasma blast, and she's got no desire to experience it. Four Seven barely seems to breathe, and whenever she speaks her voice is soft, like too much noise might draw the attention of the Covenant forces as easily as a flicker on their sensors. Tex finds herself mirroring the other woman's tension, her own voice not much more than a whisper, her movements limited to slight shifts in the chair every now and then and an occasional glance over at the displays.

Once they've slid entirely to the far side of the moon Four seven hits the thrusters and they skitter into the asteroid belt on the outer edge of the system, which is where they're meant to rendezvous with the MoI. It's another hour and a half before the larger ship drops out of slipspace, and by that point the tension has faded and Four Seven's taken to reading excerpts from her current fucking terrible mystery novel aloud. Tex is picking at the dried mud splattered across her armour whenever the pilot isn't looking, flaking it off in tiny chunks and dusty powder onto the deck plating.

""And I suspect, Officer," I added, donning my trench coat and tipping my cap to the detective and her rookie, "That if you look in the basement of that old farm house, you'll find the bodies you've been looking for. Seems dear old Mr. Worthers wasn't as much of a Southern gentleman as he would have us believe." Bla bla bla, eight pages of barn sex, three more comparing horses to shuttle craft-- what the fuck, who let me spend credits on this-- Yes, Command, I read you, this is Four Seven Niner requesting permission to dock."

Tex pops open the safety harness before they're even in the docking bay, and she releases the ramp as soon as they've settled down to the floor and the bay has pressurized. Four seven doesn't seem in any hurry to get up, yanking off her helmet and shoving a hand back through her hair.

"Thanks for the ride," Tex says, pausing to look back at her and give a respectful nod. "I appreciate not being on fire."

"Any time," Four Seven returns. "And any time you wanna borrow a book you just let me know."

Tex snorts. "Yeah. I'll do that."

The Director is waiting for her when she jogs down the ramp. Her salute is sloppier than she'd like because of the way her wrists are still not quite willing to be wrists, but he doesn't seem to notice.

"Agent Texas. Were you able to achieve the objective?"

York is standing near the entrance to the bay, ostensibly chatting with a few of the ground crew but his gaze keeps flicking in her direction. Like he's keeping an eye on her. She's not sure yet if she should feel flattered or suspicious. The scars around his eye are still angry and fresh.

"No Sir," she says, keeping as much of the disdain from her voice as she can. "The alien attack sort of got in the way."

"Hmm," he says, like he doesn't find this reasoning particularly sound. "You were unable to retrieve any of the data?"

"I didn't even get into the compound, Sir," she says.

"I see. So your mission was a failure."

"Sir, with all due respect--"

"I'm not interested in excuses or the particulars of your inability to complete the task, Agent," he says coolly. "The only point of relevancy is success or failure, and you've made that point quite clear. Report to The counselor for debriefing at 18:30."

"Sir."

"Dismissed, Agent."

York falls into step with her as she exits the docking bay. "Hey, man. You ok?"

"Sure," she says shortly.

"Almost getting caught in a glassing, that's some pretty rough luck," he continues, undaunted by her taciturn reply. "You're lucky you made it out."

"Luck had nothing to do with it," she says, sighing impatiently. "Four seven's a hell of a pilot."

"Mmhm, I won't argue with you on that. But listen, you don't look so good. Make sure you head over to recovery before your debrief."

She rolls her eyes. "Sure, York."

He peels off toward the training rooms with a final concerned glance in her direction. It's almost 18:30, so she heads straight for The Counselor's office, tracking mud all the way.

The meeting with The Counselor goes for hours. Unlike The Director he's laser-focused on the events of the glassing and her reactions to it. Makes her go over it again and again, asking variations on the same questions about her mental and emotional state, asking her to describe what she'd seen and how each individual image had effected her. By the time he lets her go it's late and the lights in the corridors have been dimmed to nighttime settings.

She passes the training room where Carolina is running one of the more difficult sims over and over, heads into the locker room and yanks off her armour. She rarely thinks to do this, often sees the armour as an extension of herself without even realizing it, but tonight the armour feels like the only thing that's holding her together. It's the sort of weakness she can't allow, so she unfolds the standard pair of sweat pants that sit, pristine and untouched in her locker. The shirt comes next, but when she unfolds it the UNSC logo is stamped across the front and the PFL symbol on the sleeve and the cotton smells like plastic and chemicals. She breaks into Wyoming's locker and steals a t-shirt gone soft and faded with wearing, the crest of one of the Inner Colonies’ more prestigious universities tucked discreetly on the shoulder. She showers away dust automatically, wraps her hair in a towel and settles in on the bench with a few cloths to clean her armour.

Connecticut comes in a few minutes before Tex is done with the armour. She’s in soft looking sleep pants and a tank top, slippered feet padding against the floor.

"I heard you had a close call today," she says, perching on the far end of the bench. Her hair is sticking up in the back like she's been sleeping on it. Tex wants to tuck her nose against the place between the collar of her shirt and her hairline, right where the skin is soft and exposed.

"News travels fast."

"On a ship this size, sure it does. And when it’s this sort of news. The Covenant doesn't just glass colonies out of nowhere."

Tex rubs harder at a spot of hardened mud. "Apparently they do."

"Somebody had to know that was going to happen," Connie continues determinedly. "Someone knew exactly what you were getting into."

Tex glances up out of the corner of her eye. Connie's flipping a knife through her fingers like a nervous habit. Tex wonders if she even realizes she's doing it. Wonders where the fuck the knife came from and how many more there are.

"You think The Director wanted the information badly enough to risk me," Tex says.

Connie frowns. "Maybe. That... would seem like the logical conclusion. But he wouldn't have sent you."

Tex glances around, checking for cameras. Wonders if FILSS is monitoring their conversation. Considers that she should be reporting this sort of talk, even if FILSS doesn't. Connie's got smudgy shadows under her eyes like she hasn't bothered to wash her eyeliner off in days. When Tex first saw her without her helmet, her eyeliner had been distractingly perfect. Tex is trying not to think about the fact that Connie is between her and the only exit.

"I think you're over-estimating my value to him," Tex says, trying to focus on the last piece of her armour but sharply aware of Connie on multiple levels. "I bet after today Carolina will get her precious number one spot back on the leaderboard."

Connie scoffs. "Do you really think that's ever going to happen? The Director knows how to motivate his people, and Carolina doesn't get anywhere by being the best."

Tex sighs. "Why are you here, Connie?"

Connie taps the blade of the knife against her lower lip, contemplating something only she can see. "Because I don't understand what happened today," she says carefully. "Because everything else has made sense. Experiments and controls. But I haven't been able to fit this into the pattern yet."

"You know you're under investigation," Tex says, frustrated. "Are you trying to get court martialed?"

Connie bounces to her feet and the knife disappears. "I'm just asking questions, Allison. I just want to know what we're fighting for. I was intelligence, of a sort, before the project. Indulge my old habits."

Tex finishes the last swipe across her armour. Connie steps away towards the door. "You should try keeping that off for a night," she says, nodding to the armour scattered around Tex. "Take some time to remember what your own reflection looks like."

Connie slips out the door as silent as she'd come in. Tex goes through the automatic motions of assembling the armour around her body until she's fully encased. It's York's implantation day in the morning, and she thinks maybe she'd like to be there when he wakes up. She wonders if he's already heard the ending to Four Seven's latest novel. Thinks maybe it'll be more of a surprise to him. Tex knows like she knows few things that Southern gentlemen are always the villains of other people's stories.


End file.
